Exile

by Denise Mina

  6

  Forever Friends

  Maureen had always known that Leslie could be a cheeky bitch but she’d never turned on her before. She would never have believed that a boyfriend could come between them because they weren’t those sort of women. They were bigger than that, they had a heroic history, and they were too close. She wrongly assumed that Cammy would be just another blow-through. She went out with them a couple of times but afterwards she was always left with the uncomfortable impression of having been talked about, kindly perhaps, but still talked about.

  They had only been together a couple of months but Leslie had changed. She didn’t want to spend time with anyone but Cammy any more and was always leaving early to hurry home to him. She started talking about having children and had changed the way she dressed. She bought a new pair of leather trousers for casual wear, offence enough in itself, but she coupled them with low-cut sexy tops with a deep cleavage that made her look cheap and vulnerable.

  The last time they had arranged to go out together Leslie stood her up. Maureen waited at the bar, drinking slowly at first, checking her watch every five minutes, every three minutes, every indignant fucking minute as she realized that Leslie wasn’t coming. She phoned the house. Leslie said she’d forgotten. Sorry. But Maureen said how could she forget? They’d only made the fucking arrangement the day before. Leslie giggled and whispered to Cammy to stop it and Maureen blushed as she listened to them, intimate and exclusive, sniggering at her. She slammed down the receiver and tramped up the road to her house feeling like a tit.

  Maureen and Leslie had met through a mutual fear of the Slosh. It was a horrible wedding. Lisa and Kenny were barely twenty and had only been together for seven months of drunken fights and public sex acts. The food was bland, the bride was drunk and the groom spent the reception making faces into the video camera. The communal knowledge that the marriage was ill-advised added a hysterical edge to the reception. Everyone laughed too loud, acted drunk before they really were, danced confidently. Maureen and Leslie were sulking alone at adjacent tables while everyone else congoed in an ungainly stagger around the room, whooping and yanking at each other’s clothes. Leslie scowled over at Maureen, tapped a fag from her and warned her that the band were threatening to do the Slosh. The Slosh is a graceless women-only line dance and non-participation is illegal at Scottish weddings, punishable by ritual dragging on to the dance floor.

  ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here,’ said Maureen, and they retired to the bar for the rest of the evening.

  They drank whisky and smoked cheap, dry cigars they bought from behind the bar. Maureen thought they were just big fags and inhaled vigorously. She could hardly speak the next day but that was down to the shouting as well; it was the most stimulating pub argument she had ever had. Leslie thought that women and men were born different but Maureen believed that gendered behaviour was learned. Leslie made sweeping statements about the nature of men and women on the flimsiest of evidence: all men were bad drivers; all men were arrogant and bullish; all women were kind and helpful. It was like listening to a bigoted misogynist in reverse. Maureen said that if women did have an essential nature it wouldn’t only encompass good things, some characteristics would have to be bad, like being crap at sums or too simple-minded to vote. Leslie didn’t have an answer but got round it by shouting the same points over and over. They swapped numbers and stayed in touch. They went to Lisa’s divorce dinner together. By the time Maureen had finished her degree they had become so close that Leslie and Liam were her guests at the graduation dinner.

  The art-history class was not a representative cross section of society. It was an intellectual finishing school for posh lassies, a grounding for careers in auction houses and other jobs so badly paid and highly prized that only the very rich could consider them. Maureen wasn’t moulding a career, she just loved the subject, and didn’t think she’d live to see twenty-one. The girls were mostly from London and Manchester, they all had long flickable hair, timeless clothes, family jewellery. The milk-fed girls were slightly afraid of Maureen and she enjoyed it. It was probably the only social group in Glasgow where she would be thought of as a rough local. Leslie, who actually was a rough local, took umbrage at the graduation dinner and tried to insult all of her classmates, picking on Sarah Simmons particularly because she had misjudged the evening and worn her dead mother’s filigree tiara. The girls conceded most of Leslie’s points, taking it all in good part, and suggested moving the evening on to a cheesy disco, looking for a gang of horny medics who were known to hang out there. Maureen, Liam and Leslie deferred the invite. Trying to spoil it for them, Leslie told the girls that the disco was known locally as ‘a pint-and-a-fuck’. The girls got even more excited and left before the coffee arrived.

  Maureen didn’t work hard for her finals. She knew that something was happening to her. The flashbacks, the disorientation and the night terrors were building to a pitch. All her time in the university library was spent on the sixth floor reading books and articles about mental illness. She thought she was becoming schizophrenic but she didn’t tell anyone what was happening. She was afraid that they would put her away, afraid that Leslie would disappear and take all the cosy, normal nights with her. It was almost a year later, when Maureen had her breakdown, that Leslie’s true nature became clear.

  After Liam found her in the hall cupboard in Garnethill and carried her into hospital wrapped in a blanket, whispering comfort and baptizing her with his tears, Leslie was the first person to visit and she kept on coming. She worked her shifts at the shelter around visit times, bringing magazines and nice food and spending time with her. But even Leslie couldn’t stop the dreams or the fear or the panicked terror or the screaming at night. Winnie came to visit, sobbing loudly, drunk and drunker, attracting pitying glances from the patients. Una came to visit and brought Alistair. They smiled nervously and left quickly. Marie, their oldest sister, couldn’t make it up from London. Busy time at the bank.

  Maureen had been in hospital for weeks when Alistair came to visit alone. He betrayed his promise to Una and told the doctors that this had happened before. Maureen was ten when the family found her locked in the cupboard under the stairs. Winnie jimmied it open and pulled her out by her leg as Marie and Una stood by. Maureen had a long bruise on the side of her face and when they gave her a bath they had found dried blood between her legs. No one knew what had happened but Michael left Glasgow for good, taking the cheque book, and never contacted them again. Winnie didn’t have to tell them it was a secret: the children knew instinctively. No-one had mentioned it again until Una took Alistair into her confidence and he took it upon himself to tell Maureen’s doctors.

  It made sense of everything– Maureen’s horror of people stealing into her room when she was sleeping, of the smell of drink in a certain light, of the dreams of prying fingers and hush and fumble in the dark. He had panicked when he saw the blood. She remembered the fist on the side of her head, the blankets of white behind her eyes, being lifted and locked in and left alone with the smell of blood, hoping she would die before he got back. When the fresh horror of the hospital and the breakdown subsided, what hurt her most was that in her memory Michael hadn’t been responding to an uncontrollable urge. The abuse was halfhearted, as if he was just having a go, just road-testing a fresh form of dissipation.

  Since the day Alistair came to see the doctors in hospital Maureen had always believed that Michael had made her bleed by ripping her inside with a ragged fingernail. It wasn’t until later, much later, when she attacked Angus and he had shouted it at her, that she considered the other possibility. Angus said that Michael had raped her. The dreams and the signs all pointed to it, and in her heart she knew it might be true. It shouldn’t matter, she told herself, it hurt and she bled and that was all. She was a child, and children don’t perceive sex as centring on penetration. Priests and lawyers and gynaecologists do, but children don’t. The possibility tha
t he raped her shouldn’t make any difference but it did, it mattered terribly. The possibility violated her in ways she couldn’t name.

  Winnie had made it clear at the hospital that she didn’t believe Michael had abused Maureen, and Maureen dearly wanted her to be right. It was easier to believe that she herself was wrong and leave the world intact. She slid back into darkness like sand into the second chamber. And all this time Leslie came, as inexorable as a lava-flow. She got Maureen to write a list of the reasons why she wasn’t making it all up. She brought books about surviving and articles about families’ reactions to disclosure. She told Maureen that she wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to believe it: no-one wanted to; no-one wanted to know about abuse.

  Maureen was at a disadvantage because Leslie had seen her at her lowest point. She saw Leslie pity other patients, avoiding them, grimacing openly as Pauline walked towards them in the grounds wearing shorts. She had never once looked at Maureen like that but, then, Pauline was hard not to pity. Admitted to the hospital weighing five stone and aiming for three, Pauline could never bring herself to tell the police what her father and brother had been doing. If her mother found out it would kill her. She had been discharged for all of two weeks when she was found in the scraggy woods near her house. She was under a tree, curled up into a ball, her face covered by her skirt. She had dried spunk on her back and the police thought she had been murdered until they found the letter in the house, a vague, heartbroken ramble about bad feelings and difficulty coping.

  Leslie hadn’t come to the funeral, she had said she wouldn’t be able to keep her mouth shut, and they had all decided not to tell her mother. It had been Pauline’s only ambition. Her mother cried so hard she burst the blood vessels in her eye. The father stood next to her on the bench, squeezing her shoulder when her sobs became too loud. The brothers wore cheap suits and hurried to get outside and have a fag, missing the line-up by the door. No-one at the funeral knew which of the brothers had been raping her. Pauline never told. The family huddled in the pub after the service, silently sipping whisky and smoking hard. Liam insisted on buying the father a pint and slipped two tabs of acid into it. Months later, they heard through the grapevine that the father had gone mad with grief and had been hospitalized himself.

  Leslie relished that small, vicious gesture. In all the time Maureen had known her, Leslie had always talked lovingly about direct action and how she’d like to blow this up and stab that one and lead the revolution. The only time either of them had attempted anything was when they came up against Angus Farrell. Angus had killed Douglas and a dear man called Martin but they couldn’t turn him in. He had done it to cover up his systematic rape of the women on the ward at the Northern psychiatric hospital, knowing that none of the deeply damaged women could give credible evidence against him. Maureen and Leslie went after him themselves, luring him to the tiny seaside town of Millport on the Isle of Cumbrae, but Leslie lost her bottle at the last minute, saying she knew she’d freeze if she had to do anything but sit with Siobhain. Maureen had attacked Angus alone.

  They had all that history between them, knew so much about each other and Maureen felt sure they would get over Leslie’s bad-choice boyfriend. It was Hogmanay before she finally realized that Cammy wasn’t a blip, that their friendship was really dying.

  Millennium Hogmanay was not Liam’s most auspicious social outing. There was a bad dry on, and demand for party drugs was exceptionally high. It seemed that everyone in Glasgow wanted to celebrate two thousand years of the Christian message by getting completely out of it. Liam had retired from dealing several months before; he still had a lot of contacts but even he couldn’t get a deal. Unused to drinking without chemical enhancement, he got completely off his face by half ten.

  Liam had never hosted a party before; he’d only recently admitted to having access to the rest of the house. During his dark, dealing days, he had left the ground floor of the three-storey town-house as worn and dirty as it was when he bought it. He kept the partition at the foot of the stairs to give his many dodgy visitors the impression that upstairs was a separate flat. He had been raided during the investigation into Douglas’s murder and the police had scared the living shit out of him. They brought dogs and ripped up the floorboards. They strip-searched him and his girlfriend. They talked to all his neighbours and told them why they were there. They emptied every cupboard in the house, tipped over every box and container. It was a long time afterwards before he told Maureen that they’d found his scuddy mags under his towels in the bathroom. They weren’t anything special but they showed them to Maggie and made her look at them. He didn’t need to explain to Maureen why it hurt him so much. They’d searched her house too, found her vibrators and gone to the trouble of leaving them in a neat pile. She hadn’t had a carefree wank since.

  Liam retired almost immediately afterwards. He managed to get back into university to study film, despite having accepted several grant cheques before dropping out of law school years before. He spent his free time between lectures renovating the house. It was beautiful. He unnailed the wooden window shutters so that they worked again, stripped the flock wallpaper and painted the bare plaster vellum yellow. The carpets, sticky from thirty years of shuffling feet and a thousand small spills, were lifted, the floorboards sanded and varnished. He bought a job lot of Victorian armchairs in an auction and the millennium party was his chance to christen the house. Leslie arrived at ten past eleven with Cammy.

  Cammy had all the equipment: he was tall and slim and blond but nature had played a cruel joke and made him an idiot. He smeared his fringe into a spiky comb on his forehead, wore a football top over straight-leg denims and had a recurring spot on the back of his neck that required urgent medical attention. Intimidated by the grand surroundings, he decided that Maureen and Liam were massively over-privileged parasites. He asked Liam whether his daddy had left him the house and Liam, pissed and unaware of the accusatory tone, laughed like a drain and said, yeah, that was right, his da gave it to him. Then Leslie took off her biker’s jacket Liam took in her change of style and asked why she was dressed like a whores’ shop steward. Leslie’s offence was lost in the memory of the night because Liam went on to greater glories. He chucked Maggie twenty minutes before the bells, saying she was too good for him, too good, and anyway, he was still in love with Lynn. Lynn heard him and was furious, said he’d made her look like a scheming cow, and she told Maggie that she’d never go out with him again. Unconsoled, Maggie locked herself in the only functioning toilet, causing a fifteen-minute queue and an inch of urine in the back garden. Half the party saw in the new century waiting in a queue with their legs crossed. Leslie and Cammy left Liam’s Hogmanay party at one o’clock, a gesture with the same social connotations as a slap in the face with a duelling glove. At the door on the way out Cammy went to the trouble of telling Maureen that he wished they’d gone somewhere else. She said she wished he had too.

  Maureen knew she must have done things wrong, that Leslie wouldn’t treat her like a prick without justification, but she couldn’t think her way through a day at work, much less six months of casual comments. She suspected that Leslie was disappointed and embarrassed by her performance at the shelter. Their friendship was dying and Maureen was too distracted by the past to make it right.

  7

  Driftwood

  They were on the edge of the city centre, in what used to be one of the busiest docks in Britain. The area had withered, the houses were run-down and the few shops were transient and dilapidated. Leslie parked the bike around the corner, out of sight of the café so that she could drink and drive without being reported. She kicked down the stand, bending down to chain the bike to a lamp-post, leaving Maureen standing alone on the pavement.

  Misty, unforgiving rain fluttered nervously around the head of the street-lights. Across the busy road stood a row of tenements with a twenty-four-hour grocer’s on the corner. A huge grey concrete housing s
cheme loomed above the roof, the little square windows framed with cheap curtains. Designed as a series of reclining rectangles, the flats zigzagged along a straight line, joined end to end by lift shafts, like a futuristic city wall peopled by a plebiscite who could be spared in the event of an attack. The wall blocked the wild south wind from the street, and squally vortexes had formed in the vacuum, sweeping the litter back and forth. On fine summer evenings plastic bags hovered twenty feet above the tenement for hours at a time, trapped in updrafts and cross-winds. Maureen flapped the skirt of her coat open and shut, trying to shake off the worst of the weather.

  ‘Is that a new coat?’ asked Leslie. Maureen nodded.

  ‘Nice,’ said Leslie. ‘Douglas’s money?’

  ‘Yeah,’ smiled Maureen. ‘From rags to bigger rags.’ Leslie blanked her and put the helmets in the luggage box, clipped the padlock shut and led Maureen round the corner. They opened the door and stepped into the Driftwood restaurant, leaving the damp night behind them.

  The Driftwood looked like a life-long dream swallowing a redundancy cheque. It was a tiny room with big windows on to the dirty street, little tables covered in wax cloth and candles in Perrier bottles. It served tempting fusion food but charged next to nothing because it was in exactly the wrong place. Maureen and Leslie were the only paying customers. A chef in a T-shirt and checked trousers sat at a table near the bar, reading a tabloid and eating a bowl of soup. A pretty blonde waitress fluttered across the floor, whipping the menus from behind the bar as she came towards them. ‘For two?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Maureen.

  She sat them at a table by the window. The convection heaters were blowing as hard as they could but Maureen and Leslie had to keep their coats on. The waitress apologized for the cold and promised them that the place would heat up soon. ‘We’re not long opened,’ she explained, and took their drinks order.